#150: Anna Witt

Friday, 11 April 2025, 24:00 | midnight—   add to calendar
BABYLON, big cinema hall, Rosa-Luxemburg-Str. 30, Berlin
admission free and open to the public

Anna Witt (she/her) is working with performance, installations and video. Her immersive installations serve as a stage for performative interventions and are at the same time part of a dynamic process. She creates situations that reflect on social structures and the political of our everyday in the context of care, labor, class and gender. The body in relation to individual and collective experiences plays a central role in her works. Passers-by in public spaces, or specific groups, – including nurses, factory workers, inhabitants of council housing or members of a youth forum, are drawn into her experimental arrangements, usually in a directly physical way. She creates situations to initiate group decision-making processes, leaving space for individual articulation and improvisation. The performative strategies range from repeated imitation of coded gestures to the development of complex choreographies, emphasizing moments of emancipatory thinking and solidarity.

Anna Witt, who is present, shows:

Push, 2006, 6:00 min
The artist asked passers-by in Venice Beach to push her down on the front hood of a parked car, and in return she did the same to them. It is a classic image of an arrest on the streets of Los Angeles and a classic motif of the nearby Hollywood studios. In an act of role reversal, each participant could experience the position of power and repression.

Rechte des Gehsteigs, 2012, 6:00 min
In The Rights of the Pavement Witt examines public forms of expression in our civil society. On view are visual forms of protest and their relation to judicial regulations. The video work shows found footage of political and artistic actions. In a voice-over one can hear an Austrian police press officer commenting on each situation. He explains the criminal delinquency and possible juristic consequences. Regulations for the sidewalk and consequently for the public space come increasingly to the fore.

Money to find – Moskau, 2012, 7:32 min
The installation represented an office in a post-Soviet administrative institution where 15,000 Rubels have been hidden. Viewers were invited to hunt for the money, without worrying about disturbing anything. They could keep whatever money they found. Viewers were thus actively engaged in the creation of a work whose development was unpredictable.

Care, 2017, 6:50 min (excerpt)
The video project Care is about two geriatric nurses in Japan. A group of amateur dancers developed a piece of choreography based on the work routines and experiences of two young Indonesian nurses working in dementia care. The dancers, influenced by Butoh and improvisational dance, were in some cases already around eighty themselves. They performed their personal interpretation of the care work as an intervention in the public space of the Maebashi city center, which is feeling the effects of an aging and shrinking population. On a textual level, the nurses explain what motivated them to leave Indonesia and look for work abroad. We learn of a massively aging society in which the care of the elderly—a task traditionally performed by daughters and daughters-in-law—is not a topic of public discussion. The problem and those involved in it do not receive any attention or recognition. The dancers in the video Care interpret the personal experiences and movements of the Indonesian nurses, whose existence in society remains largely invisible. Closeness, physical contact, self-surrender, allowing oneself to be carried, empowerment, and disempowerment are important themes of interpersonal relations, which always concern the dignity of the individual and are thus politically charged.

Body in Progress, 2018, 19:11 min
The video installation Body in Progress, was made in the urban-development area around Vienna Central Station and the Quartier Belvedere. Anna Witt engages with ways of imagining an optimized world of work and life. Here they are conceptualized through an analogy between work and workout. In a 5-channel video, panoramas and details of the work environment in the area’s hotels, construction sites, and Erste Campus offices, are interwoven with shots of athletic interventions into a fragmentary whole. Anna Witt asked a group of calisthenics athletes to use the buildings and work areas for their bodyweight exercises. The relatively new extreme- lifestyle sport of calisthenics is about free body training, which largely eschews fitness machines and can be performed anywhere, at any time. Characteristics such as commitment, individuality, freedom from rules, and self-optimization—attributes of our contemporary working world—are symbolically transferred to the body. There is also textual content, based on the artist’s conversations with working people on site, which explores their experiences with work as a power factor and what they understand that to mean, as well as utopias and reflections on the network of relationships between the individual, work, and society.

Unboxing the Future, 2019, 24:40 min 
How does automatization and artificial intelligence affect the working situation in an industrial town like Toyota city? What are its effects on the human condition and what does labor mean to each one personal? Factory workers and employees of the car industry in Toyota city came together to discuss their personal experiences and expectations towards the future of labor, automatization and artificial intelligence. In addition to the discussion, imaginative utopian and dystopian aspects are expressed through elements of body movement, sound and performance. The workers extracted movements of their daily working routines and transformed them into a collective choreography. In an act of creativity, they experimented with acoustic instruments and created a reverse process of production by dismantling working clothes. By carefully cutting of piece after piece of cloth from each other’s bodies, they created a playful yet intense moment of liberation. The work was developed in an experimental collaborative process of the artist and the participants together.

Bond, 2023, 20:00 min
For Bond, Anna Witt collaborated with the members of Youth Forum Gröpelingen. The video that arises from this collaboration, explores the ways which the young people position themselves against the past of this district, perceive its present and consider their future. Together we explored visual and performative spaces to activate forms of solidarity and empowerment in Gröpelingen, a district historically marked by industry and migration. Archival images about strikes and protests of the first generation of so called “guestworkers”, became the backdrops for the film and a tool to reflect on the past, in order to produce their own position for the future. What images do we want to see in the collective memory and how have ideas about self-positioning, discrimination and cultural diversity changed in the eyes of today’s young generation in Gröpelingen? The members of the group are at the same time protagonists in the film and directing the choreographies, in order to keep the control over the images being produced about themselves.

Anna Witt (born 1981 in Wasserburg am Inn), studies 2002–2008 at the Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien under Monica Bonvicini and at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste München under Magdalena Jetelová and Asta Gröting. 2003 While studying, produces her first video “Die Geburt”, in which Witt and her mother re-enact her birth in 9 minutes. 2005 Full scholarship from the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes. Witt starts working in the public sphere with passers-by, and produces the videos “Kontakte” (2005) and “Push” (2006). 2006 Features in the exhibition “Traurig sicher, im Training” at Grazer Kunstverein, Steirischer Herbst, Graz. 2008 Included in Manifesta 7, Trentino, South Tyrol. 2010 Austrian state scholarship for video and media art, first institutional solo exhibition at Lothringer 13, Städtische Kunsthalle München, and features at the 6th Berlin Biennale. 2012 Work scholarship, TICA-Tirana Institute of Contemporary Art, Albania; Bayerischer Staatsförderpreis, performance section. Between 2008 and 2012, produces video works on the topics of migration, self-observation and observation by others, and forms of re-enactment and self-empowerment. 2014 Work grants in Chisinau, Moldova; Goethe Institut Sofia, Bulgaria; Stacion, Center for Contemporary Art, Pristina, Kosovo. 2015 Work scholarship Atelier Tokyo, BKA Austria. 2015–2016 One-year project in collaboration with Ahsraf Jabal and Alexa Dreesmann on their experience of fleeing from Syria and the GDR. The resultant multimedia installation “Walking Through Walls” is presented at the Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst in Leipzig in 2015. 2016 Solo exhibition at the Kunsthalle St. Gallen. 2018 Solo exhibition “Human Flag”, Belvedere 21, Vienna; Msgr. Otto Mauer-Preis für Bildende Kunst. 2019 Nanji residency scholarship, Seoul Museum of Art. 2020 Austrian state prize “Outstanding Artist Award”, video and media art section.